Global Policy Forum

UN reform helps - but it's just the start

British proposals to expand and, to a limited degree, reform the UN security council, expected in New York this autumn, will spark fresh debate about an intractable problem. That problem, symbolised by the council's pre-war failure over Iraq, has led some to suggest that the UN is finished as the foremost international political forum and that it should henceforth concentrate on humanitarian, peacekeeping and development work. The inability of the security council to subject the use of force to the rule of law - its primary purpose when created in 1945 - is hardly new. In this broader context, Iraq was but the latest of many failures.

The Foreign Office plans are essentially pragmatic. There is no suggestion that the five permanent security council members should surrender their seats or their vetoes. Instead, five additional permanent members are proposed, without veto powers, and a number of rotating members. It is evident that German permanent membership, for example, would increase western Europe's already disproportionate representation on the council. It is a moot point whether Mexico, Nigeria or South Korea and other Latin American, African and Asian countries might agree to be represented, in effect, by Brazil, South Africa and Japan.

But London's ideas are plainly based on a conventional perception of basic 21st-century political and economic power realities, not on any ideal concept of fairness or equality. Britain's practical objective appears to be the avoidance of future Iraq-style cataclysms by reinforcing the inclusive, global character of the council, thereby bolstering its status. Whether influential parts of the Bush administration, instinctively hostile to supranational authority of any kind, will support this remains to be seen.

Yet in the wider context, such modest proposals amount to doodling in the margins of the global narrative. They do not begin to address the fundamental problem of the unchanging tendency of nation states, acting singly or in ad hoc coalitions, to pursue or protect perceived national interests by all means, including the use of force. Most recently, Iraq, Kosovo and Chechnya have shown the continuing willingness of states to bypass or ignore the UN. Tufts University's Professor Michael Glennon is among those who argue that the UN, frequently unable to uphold its own charter, was a discredited body long before September 11 2001. Prof Glennon suggests the UN's bilateral paralysis during the cold war has been superseded by a unilaterally induced paralysis, the product of insuperable US hegemony and the idea of unipolarity. Even a more ambitious UN reform would be unlikely to alter these realities.

What in time may do so, however, is the gradual yet steadily advancing emergence of what might be termed the third force of 21st-century politics - what the LSE's Professor Mary Kaldor calls "global civil society", or, more loosely, the idea of "international community". Both existing, territorially defined state power-structures and multilateral organisations like the UN appear either unwilling or unable to respond to this phenomenon, which is in part the result of their own failures. In Prof Kaldor's broad definition, this amorphous but increasingly powerful global civil society comprises activists of all descriptions in all walks of life and spheres of work - those who might be termed "engaged". But it also includes those tens of millions who may be energised (and even radicalised) by a single issue as over Iraq, African famine or global warming. Crucially, this civil society exists outside and beyond the direct control of established state and multinational authorities. This idea of a non-state global citizenry would at one time have seemed absurd, or utopian. Not any more. It is the organic product of the age of globalisation and interdependence, made possible by mass communication, mass media and mass transportation.Predominantly a force for good, it can shake elected leaders and tyrants alike. But it has its outlaws, too, such as terrorists, also operating transnationally.

This global civil society has been called in another context the "parallel polis"; put simply, it is people's power on a global scale. While as yet disorganised, its impact is essentially democratic. And as politics-as-usual increasingly fails to respond to or resolve global concerns and thereby destroys trust and confidence, this global society of peoples as opposed to governments poses a growing challenge to multilateral institutions like the UN, reformed or not.

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